Yasso 800s, Burpees, & Bear Crawls (Oh My!)

I hope you all had a great weekend! We had a lot of rain and generally gross weather last week, but it cleared up just in time for the weekend so my mom and I were both able to squeeze some great runs in!

We kicked off Saturday morning with some speedwork at the track.

I tested out a new camera timer app I downloaded by taking a pic of my snazzy Asics. 🙂

I did the same workout I had done the last time, except I managed to NOT wimp out this time and did 6 repeat 800’s instead of 5. 🙂

Fun fact I just learned about Yasso 800s – if you do 10 sets (so that means 10 800-meter repeats with a 400 meter jog in between each), take the average time in minutes and seconds and translate that into hours and minutes to get an idea of your marathon finishing time! So for example, if you do your repeats at an average of 3 minutes, 30 seconds, your marathon finishing time should roughly be 3 hours, 30 minutes. The runner geek in me finds this pretty cool.

I had heard of Yasso 800’s before, but I never knew this detail about them! Needless to say, I plan to keep doing this workout and gradually increase my sets up to 10. I did ZERO speedwork before my last marathon, so I have no idea how accurate this would be for me (it varies by individual), but I really want to experiment now. I came across this factoid on Sunday while browsing through the newest addition to our running library –

My mom picked this out to help as she begins training for marathon #2, the Baystate Marathon. I’ve only just started paging through it, but so far it seems like a pretty awesome resource! It has beginner, intermediate, and advanced training plans for both half marathons and marathons. My mom and I will both have to read through it some more, but I’m definitely thinking this one will be worth a review here on the blog!

On Sunday, I went for a nice, quick 3-miler followed by some burpees, bear crawls, and lunges in the backyard. I’m just going to say it – I hate burpees. I basically never did them before and now I kind of wish I could go back to the state of blissful ignorance where I didn’t really know how hard they are, but given that I’m doing a Spartan race in 2 weeks, it seemed like a good idea to semi-prepare for it.

And this GIF pretty much sums up how I’m feeling about that.

After that, I went with my parents to take Brady and Keeper to a nearby field where they can run around and swim in the pond. I cannot begin to put into words the excitement/love Brady has for these outings (he sounds like a crying baby when he realizes where he’s going). As always, he had an absolute blast jumping into the water and chasing his tennis ball.

So overall, a pretty great weekend for running and being outdoors! God, I love the summer. 🙂

How was your weekend? Did you run? Anyone else have a dog that LIVES for swimming and tennis balls?

Nice job with the Yassos!! Bart is my buddy and he will further tell you that if you have a goal marathon time (let’s use your 3:30), then you should strive for your 800s to all be 3:30. So if that is your goal, you start the first week with 2-3 of them and build throughout your training. If it’s too easy, kick that pace up a notch 🙂 And read his book! You’ll love it!!

It is so cool that you are friends with Bart Yasso!!! I’m DEFINITELY including yasso 800’s in my future marathon training, I’d love to improve on my previous time. I will have to look up his book, I didn’t know he had one!

I feel like I have no idea how track workouts actually work, despite the fact that I do them with my HTH training group 🙂 I just do what the girls tell me because I’m terrible at math! But that’s a really cool trick!